Sep 19, 2016by Naveed Butt

While starting to implement Continuous Integration on Team Services portal for our team project (proofix), I realized that there is not much up-to-date content available even on MSDN for setting up a build and CI on Team Services or TFS.

I implemented it using the new UI of Team Services released (somewhere) in September, 2016. The overall User Experience may vary a little on different versions of TFS, but you can have an idea of how to implement the CI on an existing code repository.

To set up the CI on Team Services, all you need to do is kick off the Build Wizard using the Builds menu from the Home page of your project for which you are setting up the Continuous Integration.

1) Go to All Definitions

2) Create a new Build Definition from the top right corner…

3) After that it is just a matter of selecting what is the nature of the solution you want to build…

There are a lot of templates available in the wizard including Android and some other Java compilers like Apache Ant and Gradle.

Let's start with a basic Visual Studio build template

4) After that You will have to choose the Repository location and the corresponding branch on which the Build is supposed to be generated

You can check the "Continuous Integration" check box to make the build run every time a user checks in some code to the repository.

5) After the Build definition is created. System will take you to Advanced Settings for the Build. You can modify different options (Add/Remove different steps) for the build, once the build definition is created.

After that it is a matter of how much you want to customize your build. Whether you want a publish profile along with the build, or if you want to create a trigger so that the entire team receive a mail whenever the build fails. These are mere settings that you can do.

In future, we may have a blog post on setting up a VM in Azure and Publishing the Application to the VM on Continuous Integration. Ciao.

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